“It seems that teachers and students can be blithely, blissfully unaware that they have different interpretations for the things being said in class. Sooner or later though, they experience a rude shock.” – Easley and Zwoyer (1975)

Goal: Seek feedback from your learners about how you can improve a lesson, learning about a difficult topic, or an assessment.

​Accomplish this goal: Give your learners an anonymous way to provide you honest feedback about lesson plans they did not enjoy, unsuccessful assessments, or topics they found difficult to comprehend. You could get learners to fill out a Google Form. I have provided a template below to copy and edit as you wish.

Goal: Get students to share advice for being successful in your class, class subject, or grade level.

Accomplish this goal: Ask your learners to come up with advice for being successful in your class, the grade level, or subject. This advice will be used to help students next year. Some options for presenting these to next year's students include adding the advice in a Padlet, Touchcast video, or Voicethread.

​Goal: Emotionally appeal to your learners in a lesson.​Achieve this goal by finding a short video with an emotional appeal, dealing with topics such as friendship or bullying. Then host a discussion or debate by posting questions or getting students to share examples.After the discussion, get students to create posters or videos relating to the topic. Check out Larissa’s example video lesson plan, You Are More Beautiful Than You Think. Also, check out Larissa’s blog for more ideas about this goal.​View her video to discover the inspiration behind the goal.​

Larissa Albano is a CertTesol certified English teacher. She started working in the language industry in 2009 as one-to-one language tutor in a school of languages in Rome. She set up her own language studio in her hometown in 2011. Since then she has been teaching children, teenagers and adults in small groups. She teaches without the support of course books because she prefers using the GTD method which involves the following three key elements: GAME, TECH and DAILY LIFE. She believes in the continuing professional development, thus, she attends several seminars and webinars related to teaching English as a foreign language and interacts with a highly qualified PLN. Larissa loves sharing her teaching ideas and experiences with other teachers all over the world by blogging on Larissa’s Languages. Her blog won the British Council Teaching English Award For Innovative Teaching Ideas twice and has been nominated for the best teaching blog by several websites, such as Macmillan and Edublogs. Moreover, she is a Teaching English associate and writes posts for the British Council Teaching English blog. She held her first TEFL workshop at the TESOL Italy’s 39th National Convention about teaching teenagers. Her motto is MAKING MISTAKES IS BETTER THAN NOT TRYING AT ALL!

Goal: Write a heartfelt letter addressed to your students letting them how much they impacted you this year or write a reference letter for students for their future teachers to read.Accomplish this goal in 2 ways:

2. Write a reference letter for your students for their future teachers to read. The idea is to make sure your students walk into next year’s class without any labels.

In Chapter 19 of The 30 Goals Challenge for Teachers I talk about the importance of removing the labels our students are given for poor choices. When they are young, they may have gotten in fights, cheated, etc. and this incident labels the student as a child as a troublemaker or bad kid. The label haunts them for life. Teachers see their files and forget the student was a child, a human being needing a second, third, or fourth chance to be guided to make better decisions. For most kids, once labeled, they lose the motivation to make better decisions. We can help remove labels of kids labeled as “bad” by writing a few sentences letting their future teachers know the great qualities of the student. In this way, we let future teachers know this kid had a teacher who believed in him/her.

An Example Letter

Your letter could be written like this:Dear John’s/Jane’s Teacher,I had the pleasure of being John’s/Jane’s 5th grade teacher. I am writing this letter to let you know what an incredibly smart, witty, and creative student you have the great opportunity to teach. John/Jane works best hands-on building incredible structures and took a great interest in computers. John/Jane often helped other students with any problems they had on the computer.John/Jane and I have had many conversations about making positive choices and he/she has promised me to do the best in your class.Thank you for being his/her teacher and helping John/Jane continue the next step of his/her learning journey.Sincerely,Ms. Sanchez

Being a teacher is one of the toughest jobs in the world. It requires an enormous amount of compassion, self sacrifice, and inner strength. Teachers go through the same amount of schooling as other professions that pay much more and offer more freedom and benefits.

I met my first batch of students in 1994. The inner city church I attended, hosted classes for kids. They needed someone to teach the class. My sister and I volunteered. We had 100 children in one room we taught for an hour, twice each week. During the first month, they pretty much ran wild. During the first class, one girl did cartwheels around me for most of that hour while I tried to tell the other 99 to settle down. My church, though, did give us textbooks, and the previous teacher began to give us ideas. We were even sent to learn about using puppets, drama, etc. for teaching children. The church ingrained in us that the purpose of being a children’s church teacher was to help the children have fun and show them how much we care about them.​These kids came from very difficult home situations. Many of their parents were either in jail or halfway houses, recovering drug addicts, teenagers, gang members, or absent. They were poor. Eventually, I learned classroom management and techniques that enabled me to see the beauty of what a teacher gives. We had fun, I had those teachable moments, and I got plenty of hugs and smiles.

Goal: Introduce a project or event you created based on your passion and vision.

​Accomplish this goal: Create a short video or graphic introducing us to a project you are passionate about. Go a step further and have your students design social media videos and graphics introducing us to their passion and projects where they need support. Design social media graphics on Canva, use a video editing tool like Blender, or you can hire someone to make a video for you cheaply using Fiverr.

ReflectionIn Chapter 20: Spread Your Message of The 30 Goals Challenge, I share ideas on how to craft a powerful message about your passion and spread your passion through social media.

I have quite a few passion projects I organize for teachers and social media is a key. I helped begin Edchat in 2009 and created this video for it. Edchat impacts millions and I even received a Bammy Award for this Twitter chat, which sparked over 400 Twitter chat.

​The 30 Challenge was founded in 2010 and below are videos associated with it. This was a video I created about 3 years ago with a simple editor and not in the best quality but still over thousands of educators have viewed it.

Tips for Crafting Your MessageHere are some tips to keep in mind for spreading any type of message.

One of my favorite kids on social media is Kid President who spreads encouraging messages for other young learners to be awesome and make a positive impact on the world. I’m sure you’ve seen this inspiring video. I believe when our learners see this 8 year-old’s impact (the age he started), they are inspired to be a positive force. We need more of our students to care enough to be peace advocates. Our learners have the ability to transform their world by thinking of ideas to deal with world issues and spread these ideas on social media. Will you be the teacher to allow them the opportunity to transform the world or will you be like so many who put up obstacles or say it isn’t in the curriculum? I have heard way too many students say their principals and teachers failed them or made their road to transforming the world difficult. Students can both learn and spread peace. Below, are ideas to help you be a facilitator and support to your learners.

Steps to Problem Based Learning

Problem

Introduce the problem

Make it a powerful story that strikes an emotional chord.

Introduce the problem by showing a video, through a blog post, take them through a case study, analyze an infographic, or have them play an online game. Scroll to Resources to discover games and other sites.

At this point, give students their mission with guidelines. See mypresentations and posts on sending students on learning missions. Keep it short and simple so students understand the task. You can include the solution product or leave that open and allow them to decide how to solve the problem.

Give students time to reflect on the problem in pairs or groups. Find a variety of brainstorming tools here.

Problem Research

Students should learn about the problem through digital research. Some options for learning about the problem through primary sources include having students conduct interviews, create and distribute surveys, study a hashtag, or Skype with experts.

You can give them the solution and guidelines when you introduce the problem. Examples may include, create a digital campaign or poster, make a Public Service Announcement (PSA), create an online game, create an ebook, organize an online project, create an advertisement, make a video, develop a product, design an app, host an event, create an infographic, or create a social network.

Generating solutions- in pairs/groups, students brainstorm possible solutions and the steps involved in implementing the solution

Implementation

Presentation

Students present the solution, reflect on the process of implementing the solution, and discuss it’s impact

Resources​Find a list of games, websites, and projects for learning about other cultures and researching world problems to help students create their messages of peace. Some of the projects may have expired, but you can get lesson ideas and see student examples:

Students Rebuild– an organization with different projects for students to join to bring peace worldwide. Check out the latest project to help Syrian refugees.

The A to Z of Hope Heart Project– ELT authors worldwide are donating one activity for a book that will raise funds for Syrian refugees. I am excited to be one of those authors.

Kids for Peace– find several missions, community projects, and events servicing over 5 million students worldwide.

Several schools participate in the Great Kindness Challenge with a list of 50 activities to choose from to complete in a week.

The most recent project is Kindness Coins for Kenya to help build a school in Kenya. See how your students can get involved.

Goal: Engage with Poetry. This goal is by Georgia Psarra. In this video, Georgia (@JoPsarra1) shares her inspiration and describes a poetry project with her students in Greece.

Accomplish this goal:Have your students create a multimedia presentation, digital story, poetry book, Voicethread, comic or a video in which they express their interpretation, emotions or thoughts about a poem. Here's a video of Georgia's students expressing their interpretations, emotions and thoughts about a poem. Click here for the poetry lesson plan from Georgia.

About Georgia Psarra (@JoPsarra1)Georgia has been a teacher for 20 years. She also runs a Foreign Language school in Greece. She has presented at TESOL Greece, TESOL Mac-Thrace and the BETA-IATEFL Conventions. She teaches both English and German. Georgia Psarra has a MA in Descriptive and Applied Linguistics from the University of Essex. She shares lesson plans and reflections at Thoughts of a Teacher.

Accomplish this goal: Share your best and/or worst lesson through a blog, podcast, or vodcast. Why do you think it was your best/worst lesson? What factors led to this lesson succeeding or going awry? What did you learn from the experience?

My Worst LessonAbout 7 years ago, I fooled myself into believing I was a pro with facing new learners. I was in Germany, teaching about 20 children between the ages of six- to seven-years-old who spoke and understood very little English. On the first day, I received a less than warm welcome. The children ran around the classroom flying paper airplanes. They climbed the walls, literally, because there were apparatus where the mats should be hanging, not the children. They picked on a little boy and I couldn't get them to stop.

I cried that day when I went home and reflected on all my mistakes. One of the biggest was my classroom set-up and organization. In my Master's course, I was introduced to Alfie Kohn's theories on rewards and competition. I went back to my class and started setting up learning stations, created activities that inspired cooperation instead of competition, created student teams, and I got rid of my award system. My classroom transformed with these changes. The students began to get along and when they finished with their work early, they enjoyed playing educational games and reading at the learning stations. These changes took some time but they were important in transforming my classes into communities where the children learned the importance of valuing each other.

In chapter 29, Goal: Manifest an Idea, of The 30 Goals Challenge for Teachers, I encourage teachers to sketch out and visual their goals in order to achieve them. Mapping out your goals creatively, adding steps on how to achieve them, and adding inspiration through images and quotes helps you make a greater connection to your goals. You begin to have a heart, spirit, and mind connection to your goals.

You are invited to share your visual boards or sketchnotes with our 30 Goals community or share on Twitter with the #30GoalsEdu hashtag to inspire others!